How to Stop Black and White Thinking (Who Made the Rules?)

Back After a Six-Month Break

Hey, hey, it’s Penny, and I am back from about a six-month sabbatical from the podcast. I really wanted to take some time and regroup, and to really just settle into where I wanted to go, what was working, and what’s not working. And honestly, the podcast had begun to feel a bit heavy for different reasons, and I really needed to sort that out, not just for myself, but for you.

I needed to sort that out for you so I could show up for you in the best possible way, and in a way that serves you at the deepest level possible. So welcome back to Soul Fusion.

Today, I just really wanna dive into life not always being what it seems, because this is a very, very real thing. We’re headed into election season here in the US, and there is spin for days. There’s manipulation on the internet for days.

And if you know me, you know that I do not watch the news. I do not listen to political talk radio, talk shows, anything like that. If there’s something that I feel I want to investigate, I only do it when I’m absolutely able to critically think and listen or watch from the perspective of: Who does this message benefit? What are they really trying to accomplish with what they’re sharing? And does this really impact me as a person?

Because there are a lot of things going on in the world out there that, you know, I wish weren’t happening, but there’s nothing that I as an individual person can do to directly impact that situation. However, by helping people to find peace and confidence within themselves, that begins to have a ripple effect.

You’re listening, you’re thinking, “Oh, God. Here she goes with damn politics. I didn’t subscribe to Penny to listen to politics.” We’re not talking about politics. I’m using it as an example to say that anything and everything that you do to better yourself as a human matters.

Every person you come in contact with… you don’t have to look at them, you don’t have to speak to them, you don’t have to interact with them at all. But every person that you come in contact with is positively impacted by your energy when you’re doing what you can to stay in your peace, to stay in a state of joy, to stay in a state of gratitude.

How Your Peace Ripples Out

And when you do have emotions like sadness, fear, aloneness, you’re not allowing those emotions to suck you down into the quicksand. When you can do that, you are having a positive impact.

They’ve done multiple studies. I will look for them and I will link them in the show notes. They’ve done multiple studies where they take a core group of people and have them transcendentally meditate, and all it takes is the square root of 1% of the population to drop crime, to drop violent acts. That’s all it takes.

So if you really wanna see the world change, then change yourself. When people say, “Be the change you wanna see in the world,” that sounds cliche, but that is one of the most deeply spiritual and consciousness-elevating concepts that there is. It’s just that most people don’t get it, and that’s okay. People will get it when they’re ready to get it. I have no judgment on that, because there was a point in time when I did not get it either.

But really, what came to me earlier this week was to come back and talk about a thousand shades of gray. Life is a thousand shades of gray, but where we all get caught up when we go through life every single day is this idea that everything is black or white.

And people carry stories. We all have our own stories, our own experiences around what is a good parent. Some people believe that gentle parenting is good parenting. Some people believe that conscious parenting is good parenting. Some people believe that strict parenting is good parenting, and some people believe that feral parenting is gentle parenting, and feral parenting is not gentle parenting.

But is feral parenting good or bad? Who decides that? People’s judgments and opinions decide that. It all depends on who’s making the judgment, and there are a thousand shades of gray in between black and white.

Why Either/Or Is a Trap

One of the most valuable things you can ever do for yourself is to get out of the idea that things are either/or. Either/or is a trap that was created to ensnare you, to create anger, fear, and chaos. I’ll say that again. Either/or is a trap that was created to keep you in anger, fear, or chaos. Or helplessness.

Let’s add helplessness, because when you watch the news, the news is designed to make you feel helpless. The news is designed to make you feel dependent on them, to close the open loops that they create in the brain. They know what they’re doing.

Not the anchors who are on the stage, but the actual news writers. A lot of those news writers train in NLP. They train in hypnosis. They train in neuro persuasion. They know how to create those loops so you keep tuning in, and they can sell more advertising dollars, and people can achieve their agendas.

The way you overcome that is to step back. When you catch yourself saying, “Well, that was wrong,” go, “Well, wait a minute. What causes me to say it was wrong? Is there another perspective here? Is there another way of looking at this?”

There was something I saw just the other day. It was a very short clip of a video of a congressman or a senator making a statement about some bill, and it had to do with women and menopause and perimenopause. And you have to understand, I only saw 45 seconds, so I’m making no judgment, because I don’t have the whole story.

But I was talking to my husband about it, and I said, “This is really gonna piss off a lot of women. But as a business owner, I can see both sides of the coin.” I can see both sides, because running a business involves risk, and part of the role of the person who runs a business is to mitigate risk anywhere that you can.

And I said, “I can see it from both perspectives,” right? And both sides are correct, depending on the attitudes and the beliefs of the person who’s running the business.

Now, here’s my take. You shouldn’t need a piece of legislation around menopause and perimenopause. People should just be kind, decent human beings, and allow people what they need to do well. That’s an opinion in the middle.

Rules cannot force people to conform into doing what’s right or wrong, or what we perceive to be right or wrong. Rules cannot force people into who we want them to be. It might on some levels temporarily, but not for long. It doesn’t happen that way.

So there are a thousand shades of gray. If you’re having a conversation with a friend and they’re saying something that you disagree with, that’s okay. There’s a million opinions about everything. And from your perspective, from your unique perspective, you’re right. But the person that you’re talking to, that you’re speaking with, that you’re debating with, that you’re entering into an agreement with or not, their perspective is valid from where they sit. And then there are a lot of perspectives in between.

When Your Intuition Keeps Knocking

We can also get into either/or in our own choices. For example, one of the things I talk about around the hypnosis training is that there are a lot of people who wanna do something that has deep impact. They wanna do something that matters. Their intuition is screaming at them.

And I often say your intuition doesn’t scream at you, but your intuition will get your attention repeatedly before it hits you upside the head with a two-by-four to say, “Hello, we keep telling you this.” Your intuition will keep telling you that you’re meant to be doing something else. There’s more for you. Come on, let’s go get curious. Let’s see what else is out there. There’s more for you.

And we’re in this black or white: “I have to stay in this job until I retire. I have retirement. I can’t leave this job. It would be stupid to leave this job. I’m making all this money. Why would I wanna leave this job?”

Number one, who said you had to leave a job? Most people can’t get out of the box of either/or to see that you can do two things alongside one another, or you can find another way to have that impact. And maybe you do find you wanna transition your way out, the same way that I did.

I never expected to go full-time in hypnosis before I retired. My plan was to stay in until I was 62, and I walked away when I was 48. I walked away from anesthesia 14 years before I planned, because I couldn’t stay where I was. But I made that transition alongside my job.

Who Said These Are the Rules?

So where are you in your life where you have just completely accepted something as reality, just because that’s the way it’s always been and you’ve never, ever questioned it? Where have you never, ever, ever, ever questioned something because you just accepted that’s the way it is? That’s black or white thinking. That’s just accepting that it is what it is.

You can change things. You get to go out and see what else there is to life. You get to go out and see what else there is to being a good parent, ways that you can school your children, ways that you can explore your relationship with your partner. All of those things exist. You have to give yourself permission to go see what else is out there.

You have to ask yourself, what else? What if it could be both/and? What if there were no rules? If there were no rules, what would I do? And then ask yourself, who said these are the freaking rules? Who said these are the rules?

Because you can create your life to be whatever it is that you wanna be. And if the instant I said that, you said, “Well, that’s not true,” you’re locked into black or white thinking. You are carrying stories and perceptions and beliefs that were handed to you, that have put the blinders on you, so that you cannot see what is possible in this world.

And if you want to lean into not questioning yourself, to being able to trust your intuition, to being able to just breathe, and you wanna do it without having to commit a great deal of time to it, that is the reason that I created Synchronicity.

Synchronicity is a monthly membership where there are wisdom drops in the membership. There are some long hypnosis audios in the membership. But here is what the people inside of that membership are raving about. Every single day, I send you a three to five-minute love note.

When you’re standing at the mirror putting on your makeup, you can play that love note. You can have your eyes open, or you can close your eyes, just standing there for three to five minutes. And it’s the consistency of every single day, feeding your mind with something positive, feeding your mind with self-belief, feeding your mind with trust in yourself, that creates change.

So I will put the link in the show notes if you wanna check out Synchronicity. I would love to have you there. Otherwise, I will see you when you tune in next week.